The Identification of Stakeholders’ Living Contexts in Stakeholder Participation Data: A Semantic, Spatial and Temporal Analysis

Abstract

Stakeholders’ Participation (SP) aims to involve stakeholders in decision-making processes about significant choices affecting their organizations, cities, or communities. Stakeholders’ participation is maintained through SP processes (SPPs) that may be traditional (e.g., physical assemblies) or online (e.g., online forums). Whether traditional or online, the purpose of SPPs is to collect and analyze data in a way that it would bring a benefit to a given decision-making process. In SPPs, stakeholders try to communicate (a part of) their living contexts, i.e., to present their objectives, daily problems, intentions, and issues they are facing within their environment. A major challenge of decision-makers is then to ensure that the living contexts of stakeholders are considered in SPPs for an effective implementation of project and policies. This paper focuses on the specific issue of the “stakeholders’ living context identification” and attempts to account for how stakeholders implicitly identify their living contexts in their SP comments. Based on a qualitative analysis of SP data from four case studies in two countries, this paper identified a set of semantic, spatial, and temporal patterns allowing to capture the stakeholders’ living contexts in SPPs data. Moreover, a conceptual model emphasizing the importance for decision-makers to capture and understand semantic, spatial, and temporal dimensions in SPPs is proposed.